"'Expanded cinema' is an elastic name for many sorts of film and projection event. It is notoriously difficult to pin down or define. At full stretch, it embraces the most contradictory dimensions of film and video art, from the vividly spectacular to the starkly materialist. Stan VanDerBeek's synthetic multimedia Movie-Drome of the 1960s, for example, is in high contrast to the analytic and primal cinema of 1970s Filmaktion screenings in the UK. Some kinds of expanded cinema widen the field of vision so far that they dissolve cinema itself as a separate entity, merging it into cybernetic space, as envisaged in Gene Youngblood's seminal book of 1970 or in Carolee Schneemann's manifesto-like performance scripts of the same era. Other variants seek film's ontology in the medium's simplest elements, such as the projector lightbeam or the bare bulb. In 'paracinema', the notion of the film medium is itself questioned, and the cinematic is sought outside or beyond the film machine." (Rees et al 2011: 12)

Jonas Mekas, "On the Plastic Inevitables and the Strobe Light", Village Voice, 26 May 1966; repr. in Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-71, New York: Collier, 1972, pp 242-244.